There is good news and bad news out of SemiAccurate about NVIDIA today. The bad news is that the chips are all Fermi, they have simply been shrunk to 28nm from 40nm. That makes the idea of mobile variants arriving first very probable with the respectably low TDP shown on the leaked chart. There at the bottom, in the row with the most question marks are the higher powered chips. The good news is that the list is incomplete, there is more in store for consumers in the same time frame. They will likely be 40nm but they will definitely not be Kepler chips.

"What does Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) have coming up for the post-Christmas GPU line? You have heard a lot about the 28nm parts, and here is what you will be seeing.

The short story is this, Nvidia is putting out a bunch of Fermi shrinks on 28nm, and you will likely see the mobile variants first. They are as follows, with some information a bit blurred to protect the exact sub-species of mole involved."

As is common in the industry, when one company releases news their competitors have to do something to distract people. Since in this case it was AMD's announcement of the Southern Islands release, it is NVIDIA who feels the need to hold a competing spectacle. In this case it was news that their new Fermi based 28nm Kepler GPU has taped out ... maybe. In this particular scenario we have an intentional leak from NVIDIA which was light on details and heavy on spin. SemiAccurate takes a long look at some of NVIDIA's claims, from the doubling of transistors with no cost in TDP to the probable difference between Tesla branded Fermi and GeForce branded Fermi cards to NVIDIA's claims that switching from 40nm to 28nm is hard and that it is all TSMC's fault.

"When SemiAccurate announced that AMD (NYSE:AMD) was aiming for September with Southern Islands (SI), you could almost set your watch to the Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) response. If you are new to the PR game, you will probably scratch your head wondering what we mean by Nvidia response, officially there is silence, but there definitely was a response."